Dotcom tells Ars: industry stats vindicate Mega’s takedown policy

An internal report by the international recording industry group IFPI vindicates Megaupload's claim that it made a good-faith effort to remove infringing material from its site. At least that's the view of Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom, who spoke with Ars Technica via instant message on Wednesday.

Earlier this week, a copy of the report was discovered on an IFPI website. The report was quickly taken down, but not before TorrentFreak grabbed a copy and wrote a thorough summary.

The report, written by IFPI's Head of Internet Anti-piracy Operations, covers a wide variety of piracy-related topics. For example, some people are reportedly using phishing techniques to try to trick artists or label employees into sending them pre-release music tracks. And IFPI is tracking dozens of sites in the former Soviet Union that illegally sell MP3s downloads.

But one of the most interesting findings was a graph showing which locker sites were responsible for the most infringing material:

The graph suggests that filesonic.com hosted the most infringing URLs in 2011, following by wupload.com, fileserve.com, 4shared.com, and rapidshare.com. Megaupload lagged behind at number seven.

Dotcom told Ars that Megaupload's relatively modest share of infringing URLs was significant because his site was the world's largest locker site in 2011. "All the other file hosters in this list were significantly smaller than Megaupload," he told us. Megaupload had "1.5 terabits of bandwidth utilization" before it was shut down. The next largest, RapidShare, had only about 800 gigabits, he claimed.

"If the largest file hoster in the world does not represent a significant percentage of infringing URL's found by IFPI, this can only lead to one conclusion," Dotcom told us. "Megaupload was very effective in taking infringing links down."

"What this statistic clearly shows is that we were a good corporate citizen and had a solid takedown policy," he said. "We had an average takedown time of 3 hours based on all takedown requests in the history of Megaupload. We also had 180 takedown partners with direct delete access and they have removed links instantly, millions of them."

It's important to note that the indictment against Megaupload claimed that the company limited the rate at which major copyright holders could take down content through its "direct delete access" tool. As we described it in January:

Content owners had a specific number of takedown requests they could make each day; in 2009, for instance, Time Warner was allowed to use the abuse tool to remove 2,500 links per day. When the company requested an increase, one employee suggested that "we can afford to be cooperative at current growth levels"—implying that if growth had not been so robust, takedowns should be limited. Kim Dotcom approved an increase to 5,000 takedowns a day.

IFPI did not respond to our e-mail seeking comment. The RIAA and Rapidshare also declined to comment.

Timothy B. Lee / Timothy covers tech policy for Ars, with a particular focus on patent and copyright law, privacy, free speech, and open government. His writing has appeared in Slate, Reason, Wired, and the New York Times.